Tag Archives: South Hebron hill

Troublers of Israel point to the Trouble with Israel

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"I'll give you one in the head," threatens the soldier who lost his composure (Screen shot).

“I’ll give you one in the head,” threatens the soldier who lost his composure (Screen shot).

Umm Al Amad 27.4.2013, IOF no need to add a word!

Almost every week, photographs and video of weekly activity by Ta’ayush in the southern West Bank circulate on social media. Ta’ayush is an Israeli-Palestinian grassroots partnership to end the occupation through non-violent direct action, currently focused on Israeli activists from Jerusalem working with Palestinian farmers in the especially troubled South Hebron Hills area. The videos and pictures generally circulate among fellow activists and supporters, rarely making the mainstream news in Israel. Typically, they show some sort of confrontation between on one side activists and farmers trying to access and work on their land, by ploughing a field or shepherding a flock, and on the other side Israeli soldiers, police, and settlers who prevent them from doing so, sometimes violently. More than 300 videos documenting such routine acts of denial of access to land, often accompanied by arrests and violence, are located on a Ta’ayush activist’s YouTube Channel, guybo111, which has attracted more than 400,000 views. The videos document the routine of Israeli Occupation, the creeping annexation of Area C of the West Bank, including small acts of dispossession and coercion. As routine, the videos and events they show in raw footage, accompanied by minimal textual explanation, are rarely considered newsworthy. Sometimes someone bleeds, but it doesn’t lead in mainstream Israeli media.

 

This week, however, a video of one such event was picked up, by both the Y-net service of Israel’s mainstream newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and the on-line news service of Walla!, a main Israeli web portal. Whereas the activist video carried (in English) the heading: “Umm Al Amad 27.4.2013, IOF no need to add a word!” the Y-net (in Hebrew) article is titled “’Arab lover’: Soldier documented yelling at Leftist Activists,” and in English, “Watch: IDF soldier lashes out at activists.” The headline of the article on Walla! is: “Soldier threatened: ‘I’ll give you one in the head, you’re worse than the Arabs’.” For activist circulation, the video needs no explanation or translation, the location being given by its Arabic name rather than the nearby illegal outpost settlement, Otniel, and the Israeli army labelled as Israeli Occupation Forces. The text that accompanies the video on the +972 blog, which opposes the occupation is committed to human rights and freedom of information provide more explanation

:

Israeli Ta’ayush activists who were accompanying Palestinian shepherds in the southern West Bank village Umm al Amad on Saturday were confronted by a soldier who lost his cool, to say the least.

According to Guy, the Israeli activist who filmed the video below, this is private Palestinian land (the Otniel settlement is nearby) that the IDF and settlers routinely try and keep the Palestinian residents out of. In the video below, the soldier can be seen first approaching the Palestinian shepherd, screaming in his face in Arabic: “You better watch it!” Then Guy tells the soldier not to scream at him and to leave him alone, to which the soldier turns to Guy, screaming: “Get out of here you Israel haters, I’ll kick the crap out of you. You are worse than the Arabs.”

He then turned to one of the female Israeli activists and said: “Shut up, Israel hater who goes to bed with Arabs.”

On Y-net news, only Otniel is mentioned, the soldier is identified as a reservist, and in addition to the testimony of the activist, an army spokesperson is quoted saying:

“Leftwing activists gathered near Otniel. While security forces were trying to disperse them, a reserve unit and an activist confronted each other. Following the release of the video, the IDF will question the reservist about the incident and the proper measures will be taken. In general, this incident does not reflect the behavior expected of security forces and the issue will be clarified.”

The longer Walla! report mentions that other soldiers tried to calm the reservist who had lost control of himself, and also provides some background, explaining briefly about Ta’ayush, as well referring to a more serious violent incident a year ago in which Lieutenant Colonel Shalom Eisner struck an activist with his rifle butt  (after which he was removed from his position). The report also quotes an unnamed senior officer in the West Bank who considers the Israeli activists to be provocateurs who stir up trouble.

 

So there was a minor incident, remarkable neither for harm done to Israeli “leftist” activists or Palestinian farmers, which raises the question of why this week’s incident became newsworthy. Perhaps it is news because something of the mask fell away from the occupation. Wrapping itself in a mantle of quasi-legality, bureaucratic procedures, and policing tactics, the occupation likes to present itself as calm, business as usual. It doesn’t like to appear as its racist, sexist self, according to which all Israelis who act in solidarity with the civil and political rights of Palestinians are traitors, and thus “worse” than Arabs (who are seen to be inherently bad), especially Israeli women, whose “disloyalty” upsets the ethno-sexist assumption that Jewish women should belong to Jewish men. In this light, the Ta’ayush  activists are provocateurs, provoking the occupation forces to show that it has no legitimacy in claims to provide “security,” and that the very premise of Jewish ownership of all the land is racist.

More than that, the Biblical Hebrew phrase used by the offending soldier “ochrei yisrael” does not simply mean “enemy of Israel” but “troubler of Israel”. While it is a curse often flung at Israeli leftists, its Biblical provenance should be, well, troubling to the cursers. One such “troubler of Israel” is Achan, the Israelite stoned and burned (along with his family) for looting precious and idolatrous objects from Jericho during Joshua’s invasion of Canaan, for which the Israelites were punished by God with defeat in their first assault on Ai (Joshua 7). Those who hurl the insult of “troubler of Israel” at leftists are perhaps comfortable with the reminder that the Promised Land had to be seized violently by the Israelites under the leadership of the ethnic cleanser Joshua. Yet the troubling implication is that the current conquerors of the Promised Land are themselves guilty of looting idolatrous objects, in this case the land itself, in whose service they are prepared to commit all sorts of immoral acts, and all kinds of modern idolatries.

The prophet Elijah is also called a “troubler of Israel” by King Ahab, although Elijah then turns around the accusation, labelling Ahab’s idolatry as the trouble brought on Israel (1 Kings 18). Merely calling Ta’ayush leftists “troublers” does not make them the idolaters, the sinners, since the charge can be reversed. This is the trouble that Ta’ayush cause, walking in the ways of righteousness by lending support to the oppressed, and by doing so, provoking the ire of the idolaters of the land.

Planning Peace from Afar: Stop Repeating the Trauma

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Photo from Jürgen Stroop’s report to Heinrich Himmler from May 1943 and one of the best-known pictures of World War II.
The original German caption reads: “Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs.”

Samir ‘Awad being evacuated from the scene after being shot, 15 January 2013. Photo: Nasar Mghar

Samir ‘Awad being evacuated from the scene after being shot, 15 January 2013. Photo: Nasar Mghar

In an expression of unbridled American optimism, former diplomat Dennis Ross, a key figure in the post-Oslo process, published in today’s (3 March 2013)  New York Times a 14-point agenda for reviving the halted peace process and reviving the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In principle, there is nothing wrong with being optimistic in an effort to imagine the achievement of peace, but ungrounded optimism can become the grounds for the lost hope of failure. Ross is aware that ‘most Israelis and Palestinians today simply don’t believe that peace is possible’ and that ‘neither side believes that the other is committed to a two-state outcome’, arguing that each side needs to overcome ‘the problem of disbelief’. So, he proposes a package of trust and confidence building measures, most of which can be undertaken unilaterally but in coordination by each side, that ‘can actually generate changes that ordinary citizens on both sides could see and feel’. Never mind that the whole approach of ‘confidence building measures’ championed previously by Ross and US administrations has led into the cul-de-sac of disbelief and despair. He has learned from his mistakes and seeks to repeat them perfectly.

One could take issue with Ross’ specific proposals, which reflect American attunement with Israeli rather than Palestinian concerns. He suggests that the Israeli government from now restrict its settlement building to the blocs in the West Bank that Israel intends to keep as part of any future agreement, while preparing to relocate those settlers who currently live outside those blocs. He does not suggest that Israel dismantle all settlements established since 2001, as required by the 2003 Road Map. Ross does call for Israel to expand the scope of Palestinian self-government and policing in Areas A, B and C of the West Bank, but he does not insist on an end to Israeli military incursions into Area A, the 18% of the West Bank that’s supposed to be under the Palestinian Authority’s full civil and security control.

Last week, there were demonstrations throughout the Palestinian occupied territories in support of the prisoners on hunger strike. In an impassioned appeal to the Israeli public on Israel Channel 2 news on 24th February 2013, PA official Jibril Rajoub spoke of the prisoners and their detention without trial in Israeli prisons as the most sensitive issue of the occupation, the focus of unrest that’s been labeled the ‘prisoners’ intifada’. But that’s not on Ross’s radar. Nor are the numerous, unpunished attacks on Palestinians and their land by extremist settlers, despite the ‘culture of impunity’ regarding such attacks, described in detail in a recent UN Human Rights report. There is no mention in Ross’s list of the ongoing friction caused by the completion of the separation barrier, which entails seizing Palestinian land and separating owners from unhindered access to it. The planned dispossession of Palestinians in the South Hebron hills to clear way for military Firing Zone 918 also does not get Ross’s attention. The weekly catalogue of shootings of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, their excessive use of force to suppress demonstrations, recorded by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, does not register for Ross as part and parcel of the insufferable burden of occupation that must be relieved before Palestinians can be convinced that the Israeli government is serious about ending its control over them.

Nonetheless, Ross suggests that the Israeli government take some concrete steps that would be felt and seen by Palestinians. By contrast, the measures he proposes that the PA take would not make much difference to the daily lives of Israelis. Instead, he says that the PA should ‘speak’ of two states, ‘acknowledge’ the existence of a Jewish as well Palestinian national movement, ‘show’ Israel on their maps (though he does not ask for a parallel redrawing of Israeli maps so that they show the ‘green line’), and end ‘incitement’. The only practical step that Ross asks of the PA is to build permanent housing in the Palestinian refugee camps (presumably to reassure Israelis that Palestinian refugees will forego their ‘right of return’ to their former land now in Israel). As he acknowledges that Palestinian security forces fulfill their obligations to collaborate with Israeli forces in preventing armed attacks on Israelis (which he’d like the Israeli government to acknowledge publicly, so long as the PA is equally generous about Israeli good-will measures, such as treating Palestinian patients in its hospitals), Ross does not include in his plan increased PA security action against armed militants. Nor does he explain how the PA should continue to repress Palestinian militant opposition to the occupation while also (as he recommends) focusing on ‘the rule of law’.

What then is Ross asking of the PA, with all this speaking, acknowledging, showing and abstinence from inflammatory language? He is asking that the PA take rhetorical responsibility for the state of mind of the Jewish Israeli public. Ross grasps well that much of the Israeli public feels insecure about its existence, dubious that further withdrawal from territory seized in 1967 will bring peace and security – although the two recent withdrawals he mentions, from southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 were both unilateral Israeli moves, in the face of incessant armed and civil opposition to their presence. But such an approach, according to which the PA offer Israelis the reassurance they want to hear repeatedly, assumes that the Palestinians (and other Arab nations, and Islamic states) are the source of Israeli insecurity. This is a false assumption, one that does not go deep enough into the trauma that needs to be acknowledged and worked through if peace is to be first imagined, and then made real. The clue is on another page of the same issue of the New York Times, a chilling report on recent research about the Holocaust that dramatically increases the known number of Nazi ghettos, and concentration, slave labour, prisoner-of-war, euthanasia, abortion and brothel camps. Well-meaning, instrumentalist, technocratic, pragmatic ‘confidence-building’ measures cannot be the remedy for a conflict in which a traumatized people has brought trauma to another. The headline of Ross’s piece is ‘To Achieve Mideast Peace, Suspend Disbelief’. The last phrase should be ‘Stop Repeating the Trauma’.

Warsaw Ghetto 1943